ereiamjh

Ironically, Comic Sans is more effort than Times New Roman.

But people would shit on a Comic Sans poster more than a Times New Roman poster.

Spring/Summer/Christmas "Fayres" are just a British thing. I'm not sure whether it's emerged as a spelling in recent years, or whether it's always been the case. But churches, village halls, schools, they've been doing it for ages.

That's not something AI has invented.

This is actually quite hard to achieve, at least in a one-shot LLM prompt.

You could engineer it by asking for a list of subjects sorted by obviousness, then pass that list to a script that discards the top 30% and randomly picks from the rest.

Even if you prompt an LLM to pick one at random, it usually won't, without an external randomness tool like that - which is curious, isn't it, when non-deterministic-ness is so inherent to LLMs.

V2 of the 100 poster prompts site is now up, and it has indeed stopped putting icons next to every single thing.

The moral is that with AI you get what you ask for. What you don't specify, it does however it likes.

I think a thought pattern that happens here is "Would you prefer a chair mass produced in a factory, or would you prefer a hand-crafted chair?"

Where by analogy, AI is the factory chair, human-designed is the hand-crafted chair.

And your mind imagines the most beautiful hardwood chair, with perfectly mitred joints, smoothed and waxed, your ideal handmade chair, made by a master craftsman.

Not the wobbly ugly piece of crap I would make if I tried to make a chair.

Ikea's cheapest factory-produced chair is a nicer chair than the one I would make by hand.

I think Canva Pro might do this - I dunno, I'm not paying for it.

You can certainly ask ChatGPT for a poster, then ask it for a collection of assets with transparency, so you can composite them as you wish.

It does take away from the "smash out a poster in 10 minutes" that a harried PTA volunteer wants, though.

I suspect the tool to do this as a one-stop shop is coming very soon, though.

I'm fascinating by how image models draw text.

I've a designer friend who's very distracted by the text on even a text-only gpt-image generated poster, because it looks like a font he knows, but differs in subtle ways.

I'm thinking, good, it's escaping from the tyranny of fonts. A font is limited by what a font layout engine can do. A human drawing letter shapes can decide that one 'f' ought to look different from another 'f' in the same layout, if that works for them. And so can AI.

This clearly works in styles like "60s psychedelic" where it's all swirly "hand drawn" letters. But I see no reason why it shouldn't work for "type". Perhaps bulk text would be more readable if the engine had that kind of freedom? If only we knew how?

The current generation of image generating AI probably isn't doing as good a job as it possibly could right now, but with the right training, all sorts of things are possible.

I'm from Britain, where in the 50s you might well have had an outdoor toilet, and still had food rationing.

BTW one of my fondest memories of poster-making in my 90s student days, was when we recreated the packaging design of Asda tortilla chips, for a Mexican night at the student bar.

Tequila slammers £1 :)

From the site:

"I recognise that almost all of the styles are entirely inappropriate for a village fête. The point is to demonstrate what you can do for any event, and to show that you can ask for whatever style you want."

Village fete is just lorem ipsum for the prompts.

Yeah, and I have opinions about [3].

I think pretending you didn't use AI, when you did, is unworthy. So I'm not trying to make posters that fool you into thinking it's handmade. I'm trying to make AI posters that aren't crappy.

I've got some AI writing too, and I don't try to remove all the clues that tip you off it came out of an LLM. I only try to remove the tics that make it read badly. And I present the work upfront as being AI-assisted.

The only problem there is, in the real world, there's a cohort of people who don't think "that looks crappy because it's AI" so much as "I don't care if it looks great; I object to AI on principle; I now hate the thing that poster is advertising". If you cared about that cohort, I guess you'd either lie about using AI, or simply not use AI. But I kinda wonder how long they'll still be around.

Mexican Calavera, you picked up on - might be one of the weakest, as it seems to apply a Day of the Dead layer on top of "default ChatGPT crappy cartoons".

It's not that CRTs were "forgiving", it's that designers leaned into what they'd do to pixels. A classic example is the tanks in Atari 2600 Combat - they look ridiculous on a hi-res screen. On a CRT they sort of look like tanks.

I have a JAMMA cabinet at home. It has a CRT in it. I usually play on x-in-1 pirate emulator board. So I don't mind that not all the hardware is authentic. But it's important to me that the screen is authentic, or it all just feels wrong. The curve must be there, the scanlines must be there.

I really get quite cross when you visit a museum and they've got retro games playing on flatscreen LCDs. Doubly so when it's meant to be a vector game.

Well, all the HN chat put me in the mood, so I did V2.

There is a lot more empty space, and lot less clutter, and a lot less over-literal interpretation of event details (just because a gig is at a venue called The Anchor, doesn't mean the poster needs a picture of an anchor)